In his 1990 encyclical Mission of the Redeemer,
Pope John Paul II wrote, “From the beginning of my pontificate I have chosen to
travel to the ends of the earth.” (No. 1)

And travel he did.

After 26 years as Christ’s ambassador on earth, he could boast of having
been seen by more people than any other man in history. It’s an obligation the
Pope described as imposed upon him by the Gospel.

“Right from the day I was elected as Bishop of Rome, Oct. 16, 1978, with
special intensity and urgency I heard the echo of Jesus’ command: ‘Go into all
the world and preach the Gospel to all of creation,’” the Pope told a group
gathered at the Vatican City in June, 2003.

“I thus felt the duty to imitate the Apostle Peter who ‘went here and
there among them all’ to confirm and consolidate the vitality of the Church in
fidelity to the Word and in service to the truth; to tell everyone that the
Church loves them, that the Pope loves them and, likewise, to receive from them
the encouragement and example of their goodness, of their faith,” the Holy
Father said.

The most-traveled Pope in history, Pope John Paul II made 104 foreign
apostolic trips and 146 trips within Italy during his pontificate, traveling a
total of more than 700,000 miles, and spending more than 10% of his papacy
outside of Rome.

“This is a pope who travels with a serious sense of purpose,” once said
papal spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls. “He’s not on some tourist package. His
aim is to reach all people — whether they are Catholics, non-Christians or even
nonbelievers.”

Only months after his election, John Paul took his first apostolic trip
to Mexico, a place where the Church had been violently persecuted during the
first part of the century. Upon his arrival, he knelt and kissed the ground.
Millions of Mexicans greeted him along with hundreds of priests and nuns who
defied the government’s century-old ban of wearing religious habits in public.

His opening address was to a group of religious at the Puebla Conference
in Mexico on Jan. 28, 1979. In it, he
hinted at the themes of his pontificate: family, vocations and young people. In
his conclusion, he asked that Our Lady of Guadalupe, the “star of
evangelization” be the audience’s guide and exhorted them to, “Go, therefore, and
make disciples of all nations.”

The Pope took that call seriously. His travels to Eastern Europe helped
bring freedom to the Soviet bloc countries. During his trips to the West, he
challenged and inspired youth and young adults at the World Youth Day gatherings.
And his travels during the Jubilee year remain some of the most poignant of his
pontificate.

The Fall of Communism

While the Pope’s visits were always pastoral, political change followed
some of his visits, particularly to the Eastern European countries. The Pope’s
second apostolic trip was to his native country, Poland, in June 1979. His
speeches there undermined communism by expressing his support for the
Solidarity workers’ movement. That support precipitated the collapse of the
Soviet bloc.

In addition to seven visits to Poland, the Pope also visited the Eastern
bloc countries of Albania, Croatia, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania,
Romania and Slovenia.

“I had been told that John Paul had never worked harder or waited longer
for any other of his … trips … than he had for this Baltic tour,” wrote Robin
Wright in The Atlantic Monthly just
after the Pope’s trip in September 1993.

“We were inspired because the Pope was someone who had escaped from the
same system that was oppressing us,” Sadunaite told Wright.

Yet, the Holy Father did not entirely embrace the capitalism and all of
its trappings. During a 1990, visit he warned Czechoslovakia not to replace
communism with “secularism, indifference, hedonistic consumerism [and]
practical materialism.”

Challenging the West

The Pope visited or passed through the U.S. seven times. They included
his visits to Washington, D.C., New York, St. Louis and World Youth Day in
Denver.

“The basic message on each of his pilgrimages was the call to holiness
given to every baptized person,” said Cardinal Stafford. “He emphasized two
elements – to love God who has given his only Son for us and to love one
another because we are all in Christ as sons and daughters of God. He has
called us to realize the universal call to holiness and has challenged us as
Catholics to use the best of the American culture.”

“When he visited Washington in 1979 the challenge he offered us was to
develop a culture of life,” said Cardinal J. Francis Stafford.

Speaking on the National Mall, John Paul said, “Nothing surpasses the
greatness or dignity of a human person,” and that the Church “will stand up
every time that human life is threatened.”

When he met President Bill Clinton 14 years later in Denver, the Pope
said the United States was a great country only to the extent that it respects
every life, both born and unborn. He carried that message to young people, one
group that the Holy Father’s travels always seemed to resonate with.

Sister John Paul with the Ann Arbor-based Sisters of Mary, Mother of the
Eucharist told of her first encounter with Pope John Paul II as a junior high
student. She went to see the Pope when he met Billy Graham at South Carolina’s
Williams Brice Stadium on Sept. 11, 1987.

“Most of the people were there to
see Billy Graham, so when the Holy Father appeared there wasn’t much of a
response. No one was yelling ‘We love the Pope,’” she said.

Therefore, Sister John Paul didn’t know what to expect when she went to
World Youth Day in Denver six years later.

“Looking back at World Youth Day in Denver, what impacted me the most
was how the Holy Father related to the young people,” said Sister John Paul.
“We were all screaming, ‘John Paul II, we love you,’ and he grinned at us and
replied, ‘John Paul II, he loves you.’ My vocation is a direct response to John
Paul II’s presence in the Church and his call to the young people.”

Many viewed the World Youth Day gatherings as a papal highlight that
will have a lasting impact.

Following Denver’s World Youth Day in Denver August of 1993,
then-Archbishop Stafford had been invited to Rome for a meeting of the
Plenarium of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. After the meeting,
Pope John Paul II greeted Archbishop Stafford in Italian.

“Ah! Denver, Denver, una
rivoluzione! Una rivoluzione!”
the Holy Father said with a wide smile.

Cardinal Stafford admitted that he wasn’t clear at first about the Pope’s use of the word “revolution.”

“What had he meant when he said
that the experience of the Denver World Youth Day was ‘a revolution’ for him?”
he said.

The matter was cleared up later when Cardinal Stafford shared it with a
member of the Papal Household, a priest who is a friend of the Holy Father.

“Before Denver, the Pope and members of the Roman Curia had looked
towards the East for the renewal of the Church; he believed, Lux ex Oriente — light would be coming
from the East,’” explained the priest. “But after his experience of young
people in Denver, he now saw ‘that light would be dawning also from the West — Lux ex Occidente. That was the
revolution! The light of Jesus had shown on the faces of those young Americans.
I pray every day that the Pope’s revolution will come about.”

Jubilee Trips

Perhaps Pope John Paul’s most memorable trips were those he made during
the Jubilee Year 2000. With considerable effort he made trips such as his 91st
trip abroad, a trip which he had spoken of and prepared for since his earliest
days — a trip to the Holy Land.

He traveled as both a peacemaker and a pilgrim. While there, he climbed
the stairs at the Church of the Nativity to see the place where Christ was
born. He visited the Jordan River, celebrated Mass where Christ delivered the
Sermon on the Mount, visited the place where Moses died, and placed a prayer at
the Wailing Wall.

His prayer read, “God of our fathers, you chose Abraham and his
descendants to bring Your name to the nations. ... We are deeply saddened by
the behavior of those, who, in the course of history have caused these children
of Yours to suffer and, asking Your forgiveness, we wish to commit ourselves to
genuine brotherhood with the people of the Covenant. “

Pope John Paul II also became the first Pope to visit a Nazi
concentration camp — Auschwitz — and to visit a Jewish synagogue, demonstrating
the Vatican’s new relationship with the Jewish people.

Father Remi Hoeckman of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for the
Promotion of Christian Unity said the Pope traveled in four ways — “as a
pilgrim, as pastor of his Church visiting Catholic communities, as the Bishop
of Rome visiting the heads of other religions, and as a Catholic visiting
Jews.”

“He is a man who has made more contributions to Catholic-Jewish relations
than any other pope in history,” said Rabbi A. James Rudin, the American Jewish
Committee’s Senior Interreligious Adviser.

And few can forget the Pope’s May 12-13, 2000 visit to Fatima, Portugal.
There, the bullet that had struck him had been welded into the Our Lady of
Fatima statue’s crown. John Paul credits Our Lady of Fatima for diverting the
assassin’s bullet that struck him in 1981.

With all the places the Pope visited, there was one he never made it to.
His one unrealized visit was to Moscow.

Marked by illness and suffering, John Paul took his final trip to
Lourdes, France on Aug. 14-15, 2004. Anticipating his own decline he told those
gathered, “Dear brothers and sisters who are sick, how I would like to embrace
each and every one of you with affection, to tell you how close I am to you and
how much I support you.”

Perhaps the most commonly asked question is why the Holy Father chose to
travel so much.

“He traveled because he knew the joy of living in the Lord and wanted to
share that with others,” said
Cardinal Stafford. “Others knew that he is a man of joy and wanted to be in his
presence.”